The "boulevardier'

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, April 18, 1999

1999-04-18 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- SAN FRANCISCO artist Sam Provenzano, dead of cancer at age 75, was described by North Beach restaurateur Ed Moose as

"a Sicilian Toulouse-Lautrec" and by Museo ItaloAmericano curator Robert Whyte as "one of San Francisco's premier painters."

Students, friends and colleagues remembered Mr. Provenzano - who died Thursday - for his deftness with divergent artistic genres, his gift at teaching, his acerbic wit and his love of the city he adopted as home almost half a century ago.

Mr. Provenzano received the most critical recognition for his abstract expressionist canvases, beginning with early work as a protege of New York painter Hans Hoffman and continuing through the 1980s with his "Wedge Series." But he captured the imagination of San Franciscans with his whimsical sketches of scenes from neighborhoods like North Beach and SoMa, a term he coined for The City's South of Market district that was made famous by his friend Herb Caen, the late Chronicle columnist.

Mr. Provenzano loved North Beach for its vibrant Italian heritage and fluid, creative ambience. Though he never lived there, he spent many hours sitting in sidewalk cafes observing and recording the colorful quirks of city life.

"I knew Sam as a post-Bohemian boulevardier," said Moose, a longtime friend. "He would go from one bar or restaurant to another and sketch. I think of him as a Sicilian Toulouse-Lautrec. He recorded so many scenes: how people dress, how they pose, how they stand in cafes. He could be pretty graphic about what he saw."

Samuel Paul Provenzano was born in the small Pennsylvania mining town of Luciusboro on Sept. 26, 1923, the second youngest of 10 children of a coal miner. When Sam was 3, his father was badly injured in a mining accident and the family moved to Rochester, N.Y., to live with an aunt.

Mr. Provenzano showed an early talent for drawing and painting, said his daughter, Katherine Provenzano Hoover. He was teased for his pastime by his brothers and often felt like the black sheep of his family, she said, but his mother and teachers encouraged him and he won a scholarship to Syracuse University.

Before he completed his studies, however, he had to go fight.

During World War II, Mr. Provenzano served in Air Corps in the Pacific. Upon his return, he earned a bachelor of fine arts from Syracuse University on the GI Bill and went on to study art in Florence, Paris and Mexico City, and with Hoffman at his Provincetown school.

Returning from the Pacific in 1946, Mr. Provenzano stopped off in San Francisco and was captivated by what he found.

"When I saw the light, the water, the skyline, I knew San Francisco was the place I wanted to live and paint," he told Lona Jupiter for an Examiner magazine story in 1989.

Mr. Provenzano returned to San Francisco in 1951 and continued to paint. He supported his wife and two young daughters by teaching nine years at the Town School for Boys.

"He taught the children of the rich and famous," said Jupiter, who studied painting and drawing with him in later years. "You'd go anywhere with him and people would come up to him and say, "Sam, I studied with you.' "

Mr. Provenzano also passed on his love of art to his own children.

"He was always in the basement, painting," said Hoover.

"My sister and I got to help with the huge "Wedges.' If there was a really big black area, we were allowed to paint on it."

After his marriage ended in 1967, Mr. Provenzano found studio space along the Embarcadero waterfront and later, after repeated evictions, at Eighth and Folsom streets, south of Market. There he ran a private studio school for adults interested in painting.

Jupiter noted Saturday that Mr. Provenzano was instrumental in pushing The City to allow artists to live in their studios, as neither he nor others could afford to rent separate living quarters.

In a 1979 Examiner column, Kevin Starr, now the state librarian, described Mr. Provenzano's Eighth Street loft as "harmonious chaos," where "hundreds of canvases line the walls."

"Over the years, he has collected hundreds of beautiful or unusual objects with which to challenge his painting students, whose easels are ranged in a semicircle at one end of the loft.

"He has a great Franklin stove for warmth, a curtained-off bedroom worthy of Balzac, and a bachelor's kitchen, as well as bookshelves that seem about to collapse under their burden of monographs and studio books, mostly dealing with painting."

Mr. Provenzano did not always receive the critical acclaim his friends thought he was due, and he became an outspoken critic of what he deemed San Francisco's unsupportive museum and gallery scene. He thought it was more fixated on what was happening in New York than on the work of local artists.

"There is too much negativism here," he told The Examiner in 1978. "How many potentially good artists are lost because of the approach of the people in control, of an art community that should be more sensitive? I think we need more pats on the back for our artists, not more kicks in the groin."

"Everybody liked him very much," he said. "He worked here for decades and was known and respected as a teacher."

Julina Togonon, who opened the Washington Square Gallery on Powell Street six years ago, remembered Mr. Provenzano for his early support of her enterprise, and his caustic humor about gallery owners generally.

"There was a favorite story Sam told," she recalled.

"An artist walks into a gallery (to show the dealer his work) and the art dealer says to the artist, "Come back when you're dead.' It's horrible, but so true. People never appreciate the work of the artist until they pass away."

As if to beat the punch line of his joke, Mr. Provenzano had work showing in three Bay Area venues before his death.

A retrospective of his work is on display at the Museo ItaloAmericano at Fort Mason until June 6, including the seminal Wedge Series. Togonon has mounted a concurrent exhibit of Mr. Provenzano's North Beach sketches, which continues through May 8.

His work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the University Art Museum, the Museo ItaloAmericano, the Oakland Museum and the Rochester, N.Y., Museum Memorial Art Gallery.

Mary Etta Moose, co-proprietor with her husband of Moose's restaurant, said she delighted in learning from Mr. Provenzano, both in the studio and in the kitchen.

"He was a wonderful teacher and a magnificent watercolorist," she said. "He was able to loosen his students up enough to let the water do the work."

She also recalled an episode where he showed off his prowess with Sicilian cuisine at her earlier restaurant.

"He learned how to cook at his mother's elbow," she said. "He was a wonderful cook. One day he came into the kitchen at the Washington Square Bar and Grill and made a batch of his favorite meat sauce.

"A lot of people have their hearts full of Sam," Moose added. "He was very much a part of the life of this city."

Mr. Provenzano is survived by his daughters, Katherine Provenzano Hoover of Sacramento and Carol Provenzano Kelly of San Francisco; three grandchildren; and two brothers and six sisters in Rochester, N.Y.

A funeral service is scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m. at Duggan's Serra Mortuary, 500 Westlake Ave., Daly City.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Hospice By the Bay in San Francisco or the Museo ItaloAmericano.&lt;

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